Occasionally the presses spew forth a book that contains a personal story packed with scientific information. The Double Helix was such a book. This is another.
Arthur Hertig has spent much of his professional life pursuing the trail of the human trophoblast. As a resident in pathology in the early 1930's, he laid much of the framework of our present knowledge of vagaries and diseases of the placenta. And with his unaided eye, hand lens, microscope, and coterie of co-workers, he has continued to build and to enlarge upon that framework until now.
So much for background. What of the book itself? Given as a Carl Vernon Weller Lecture before the Michigan Society of Pathologists in 1964, it is a monograph documenting Hertig's labors in a difficult field. The work provides insights into the workings of a disciplined mind, relates anecdotes of events that culminated in important discoveries, and shows